Turn on & manage community contributions

Your community of viewers can help you reach a larger audience by adding title, description, subtitles, and closed captions to your videos. Once you have same language captions for a video, your community can submit translations to help you reach a global audience.

When content is submitted, you can manage it by reviewing, editing, publishing, flagging, or rejecting it. Your community can also review the content, and it'll automatically be published when it gets enough reviews.

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Turn community contributions for videos on or off

Before your community can submit titles, descriptions, closed captions, or subtitles, you need to turn it on for selected videos or make it the default setting for all videos on your channel. Learn how fans contribute and review this content for your videos.

Note: Following these steps to turn community contributions on or off will apply the setting to all videos — any setting applied to individual videos will be reset. You can still turn it off for individual videos.

Click your account in the top right > Creator Studio.

On the left, click Translations & Transcriptions > Community Contributions.

Click Turn on for all videos. If you don't see that option, click settings in the top right, then click Turn on for all videos. You may need to choose a default language for your channel first.

To turn this feature off for all videos, just click settings > Turn off for all videos.

Once you've turned on community contributions, make sure to let your viewers know that they can help with reviewing and translating videos.

Manage community contributions

Once transcriptions or translations are submitted, the content goes through a review process. YouTube moderates these submissions for spam and inappropriate content, while getting input from you and your community.

When enough people contribute titles, descriptions, captions, or subtitles for a video, your community is prompted to help review the content (instead of adding to it). When that submission gets enough reviews, it's automatically approved for the video. This saves you time and lets your community experts help in their language.

You can review, edit, flag, or reject content. You can also publish or delete content that's been approved.

Delete submissions for title and description: Go to Video Manager > Info & settings > Translations and select the delete icon next to the language in question.

Tip: If the translations are in a language that you don't know, you can get Google's best guess of the content by checking the Google Translation, which translates the community contributed translation back to the original language.

Give credit to contributors

When you allow community contributions on your channel or video(s), we automatically publish the top contributors in the video's description. Contributors can only be listed if they have a channel on YouTube and if they agreed to be listed publicly (they can opt out).

The main 5 contributors per language are shown, ranked by their contribution to the published version.

The contributor list shows in translated versions of the video description (if applicable).

You can also see the list of contributors under the Subtitles & CC tab next to the version they contributed to.

Note that currently only contributors to subtitles/CCs can be credited in this way.

Get notifications about contributions

You can get a weekly email summarizing community contribution activity on your channel. Go to your notification preferences and select Send me emails about my YouTube activity.

You can opt out of these emails at any time by clicking the Unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email you receive.